Rollon Marko is a punk. I’ve only know Rollon here for around few short days, and already I can’t stand the sight of his smug face. You’ll have to take my word for it for now, but I promise you that when I’m finished with this story, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

Rollon Marko had a girlfriend. Her name was Courtney DeLano. At approximately 3AM on the night of May 22nd, 2010, Marko put a bullet in the chest of the 19-year-old woman, mortally wounding her. She would die a few hours later at Bronson Hospital in Portage, Michigan.

No one really knows why Rollon Marko shot Courtney Delano. According to Donald Morgan, a 51-year-old truck driver and neighbor of Marko and DeLano, he heard two people arguing loudly in the parking lot just before the shooting:

In Alberta’s Bowden Institution, about 100 kilometers north of Calgary, lives a very sorry individual. He cries in his cell and tells everyone how remorseful he is, how ashamed. He’s been in prison since 1984, and he wants everyone to believe he’s not the same person now — he’s new and improved! David William Shearing even changed his surname to Ennis, his mother’s maiden name, because he’s not the same person. He wants out on parole, he wants to start life anew, and he wants all of us to forget who and what he really is.

Nothing’s changed. It’s always been about what he wants. It’s especially true of the week of Aug. 2, 1982. That’s the week David William Shearing destroyed an entire family. Six loved and loving people dead because he wanted them to be dead.

Ah, jolly old England. Whenever I think of England, I usually think of the Royal family, Winston Churchill, high tea, stuffy attitudes, bland food, fish n’ chips, fog and lots of rain. I have been fortunate to have traveled to England on many different occasions for business and always enjoyed my time there.

Except for the food. I’m sorry, but this hard core redneck ain’t eating nothing called “spotted dick.” I think the English many have been extremely repressed sexually when they got down to naming some of their national dishes. I mean Bangers n’ Mash, Toad-in-the-Hole, Spotted Dick, Bubbles n’ Squeak, and Ploughman’s Lunch doesn’t exactly sound like a dinner menu to me. Don’t even get me started on the blood puddings.

Gag.

Being a Mom is hard. When they are babies, you are constantly getting up to feed and change them. Then there is diarrhea and projectile vomiting, which always means, as all you mothers out there know, if one gets it, they’re all gonna get it, until you’re up to your eyeballs in puke and liquid shit.

As they grow, they leave their stuff laying all over the house like little death traps. I don’t know how many times I’ve damn near killed myself stepping on one of those teeny, tiny, microscopic Lego’s. And shoes! They’re everywhere. It ain’t like they have small feet you know. Would it kill them to expend those two fucking calories to bend over, pick up their shoes and put them away?

My two daughters are grown now; Amanda just turned twenty-one, and Megan, my psychologist in the making, is nineteen. It wasn’t so long ago, however, that they were a pair of rugrats who could destroy an entire living room in the time it took an adult to eat a ham sandwich.

My ex-wife and I were particularly protective parents. Toni and I have had our differences over the years, but I never worried about the girls when they were with her. God help anyone who ever got between that mama bear and her cubs.

The phrase ‘perfect storm’ was first coined by William Makepeace Thacheray in his novel “Vanity Fair” in 1847. This phrase commonly refers to an event or series of events where rare and powerful forces collide to dramatically aggravate an existing situation with disastrous results.

When John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho of Brownsville, Texas met in 2001 it began a chain of events that ended with an event that would rock not only the city of Brownsville, but the entire state of Texas. And given all the wackiness that goes on in Texas, that’s saying a lot.

Angela Camacho was born in Mexico and illegally immigrated to the United States. She settled in Brownsville and had a child with one man and then became pregnant again by another. When she was about one month along in her second pregnancy, she met John Allen Rubio.

Gather round friends, it’s story time. Just relax and close your eyes. Free your mind. Now imagine, if you will, living in a nice rural area. Good neighbors, your kids play together, life is grand. But something is starting to threaten that warm fuzzy security. You’re starting to notice that something has been climbing around on your cars. You’re perplexed, and a tad bit annoyed.

Then you see and unidentified animal lurking about. Hmm. You are in a rural area, it could be just about any 4 legged bugger encroaching on your beloved land. Then on one dark country evening, shrouded in the blackest of nights without pollution from any city lights, a creature lunges at you. It’s time to think about your safety. The safety of your children even. You set up a steel trap and bait it with some delicious ham and anticipate what monster of the dark awaits you. You go check the trap, and you’re faced with this deadly ferocious creature:

Sometimes I wonder where we are heading as a species. Guess that’s why I loved George Carlin’s humor – watch the news and then quickly seek a DVD with Georgie to unwind. I miss his misanthropic humor as it was a reflection of my own: dark, psychopathic, and, at times, hilariously inappropriate!

As bitter as some found his views on life to be, he wasn’t too far off the mark when he said that humans were screwed up. Take this for instance: it typically takes up to a full year to plan a wedding. Did you know that? And the cost of the average wedding can rival what some people owe for their mortgages. Makes eloping look like a strategic financial decision, doesn’t it?